Magento – how to remove compare products from sidebar

You have to change the root template for <catalog_category_default> and <catalog_category_layered> inside your local.xml

i.e.

<catalog_category_default>
    <reference name="root">
        <action method="setTemplate"><template>page/2columns-left.phtml</template></action>
    </reference>
</catalog_category_default>

Notice page/2columns-left.phtml. The template you are using is page/3columns.phtml

Take a look inside app/design/frontend/base/default/template/page/ for default layout templates that come with Magento.

For whatever reason, in my version of Magento 2.1.4, this functionality actually does work with the full_page cache enabled. This has tripped up my team at least once before with a different issue.

php bin/magento cache:enable full_page
php bin/magento cache:status # if you're curious

Note, as you would imagine, this makes development quite tricky. My workaround workflow:

• Enable full-page caching
• Refresh page. Now you should be able to see those products in your Wishlist and Compare list. At this point, I use the Chrome Inspector to make my CSS updates. When ready, paste CSS into your text editor as usual.
• Since full-page caching is enabled, the page will not reflect your changes on refresh. Run php bin/magento cache:flush full_page.
• Now, on page refresh, you will see your CSS updates (assuming that you have the reset of the CSS workflow happening correctly).

Other than this odd example, I keep the Magento caches enabled for development except for block_html and full_page. This provides a nice balance between seeing CSS and template changes immediately while retaining the performance benefit of having the cache enabled.